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This is part of me trying to share the things that work best in my lessons. Unfortunately, this one starts a little weird, as it’s probably not going to be great for you without some modification. My version is all the way at the bottom of the post.

The history game

You won’t believe this, but I didn’t have a single intermediate to advanced group that didn’t get into sorting historical events. The idea is that students are given events from different ‘timelines’ (their town, their country, the industrial revolution, basic American history, whatever) and have to sort them into order.

Sure, we all know that the Declaration of Independence was signed before George Washington became president, but was that before or after the local landmark church was built?

Gameplay

I generally ask the students something like, “who do you think knows more about history, you or the person on your left?” And we sort of all talk about the other people’s history knowledge, never our own. (Because that gets more talking done.)

Then, I say we have a history test, and we’ll see. (My students all know that the ‘tests’ aren’t real, and they still get wound up.) They all insist they’re not “good at history.”

I spread out a lot of events — without year — on individual strips of paper and I make one end of the table the future, and the other end the past, and say “The rules are simple:”

You turn over a paper and read it out loud. Then, you just fit it into our timeline. I’ll start with (takes paper), “JFK is born. Hmm. I think that happened between the future and the past.”

The next person turns over a paper. And has to fit it into the timeline. “First steam engine invented.” That was clearly before JFK was born…

As the game continues, we can all discuss where an event fits, but only the person who turns it over gets to make the final call. That leads to a lot of “do you think Bismark had a chance to read ‘Das Kapital’?” conversations.

When we’re finished, we’ll check our results. Originally, I didn’t think this was an important step, but after so much energy is invested in it, it’s a hit.

Generally, we’re all impressed by some surprising things (the American wars against the Indians ended in 1924! Who would have guessed?) but impressed at how well we’ve done.

The prep

At the bottom of the post is the stuff that I use, but it’s pretty tuned to Dresden, Germany. The thing is, there are a lot of different timelines on Wikipedia, and I took events from different ones that I thought my students should know, and sorted them into one single timeline.

And I put them together. I’m not going to lie, I invested an hour or so in making this (which is why I’m sharing it). That’s more than I generally invest in a single lesson, but it was a winner across five different intermediate / advanced groups and I’ll be keeping it in my back pocket as an activity for when I fill in for a colleague or whatever.

My version

This is what I use. I copy the events twice, using the first list as the answer key and printing the second set larger and without the years in order to make the papers for the table.